Thailand and Malaysia clamp down websites

ICTs in general 1 Minute

In moves bound to embolden Sri Lanka’s own regime to officially clamp down on websites, Thailand and Malaysia blocked or shut down hundreds of websites this week. Thailand’s manifestly idiotic and regressive lese majeste laws were used to shut down 344 out of a total of 400 sites it shut down. As this Asia Media report notes,

The Information and Communications Technology (ICT) Ministry said that between March and August this year, it detected more than 1,200 sites disturbing the peaceful social order and morality of the people, and/or which were considered detrimental to national security.

And you then wonder why private ISPs such as Dialog Telekom (a subsidiary of Telekom Malaysia International BhD) supinely accede to diktats by our incumbent regime to block access to Tamilnet.

Not to be outdone in South East Asia’s silly season on the web, the Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission earlier this week ordered all 19 of the country’s Internet service providers to block the controversial political portal Malaysia Today. As noted in CNet News the MCMC states that,

“It is being blocked because we found that some of the comments on the Web site were insensitive, bordering on incitement”.

What’s particularly pernicious about the Malaysian case is that the Malaysian government has broken a promise not to censor the Internet. As the CNET News story goes on to note, this was “a commitment it first made when the nation launched its Multimedia Super Corridor strategy in 1996. Under the MSC Malaysia 10 Point Bill of Guarantees, the government pledges to ‘ensure no Internet censorship.'”

I was in Malaysia last year during GKP III amidst street demonstrations and unrest, when news reports of the ethnic and communal rifts that were turning violent read like capsules of Sri Lanka’s own sordid history of ethnic marginalisation and discrimination.

I strongly feel that it is only a matter of time before the Sri Lankan regime begins to follow the reprehensible examples of Thailand and Malaysia.

Published by Sanjana

An Ashoka, Rotary World Peace and TED Fellow, I have since 2002 used, studied and advocated Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs) to strengthen peace, human rights & democratic governance. I founded in 2006 and till June 2020 edited the award-winning Groundviews, Sri Lanka's first civic media website. From 2002-2020 I was a Senior Researcher at the Centre for Policy Alternatives. I pioneered both the use of social media for activism and online citizen journalism/civic media in Sri Lanka, including setting up South Asia's first Twitter and Facebook accounts for civic media, in 2007. Having started digital security training for human rights activists in 2010, I continue to advise civil society on digital hygiene, mass and personal surveillance, privacy and secure communications to date. I also curate a comprehensive digital archive of material linked to peace and conflict in Sri Lanka, since 2002. I specialise in, advise and train on social media communications strategy, countering-violence extremism online, web-based activism, online advocacy and grounded, context-based, platform-specific social media research. My work experience over two-decades spans five continents. Through the ICT4Peace Foundation and since 2006, I help strengthen information management during crises and work on countering violent extremism online. For over a decade, this included leading the Foundation's work on these lines with the United Nations and other multi-lateral organisations involved in peacebuilding, peacekeeping, and humanitarian affairs. Since 2008, I have worked in South Asia, South East Asia, North Africa, Europe and the Balkans to capture, disseminate and archive inconvenient truths in austere, violent contexts. I completed doctoral studies at the University of Otago, New Zealand, looking at the symbiotic relationship between offline unrest and online instigation of hate and harm in Sri Lanka and, in the aftermath of the Christchurch massacre in 2019, facilitated by leading research based on New Zealand's first ever Data for Good grant by Twitter.

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